The Truth About Running a 2:29 Marathon | Becky Briggs | Ep 57

What was your training looking like then?

So this was when I was still living back at home, so back in East Yorkshire.

It was nothing sort of super, super crazy.

I would do a track session once a week.

I would do a really tough hill session, some tempo work, a lot of easy running.

But saying that the easy running was never easy, and this isn't something that I would... advocate as advice by any means but a lot of the running I was doing was quick it's not sustainable I definitely wouldn't be able to do it now I think my body would give up but at the age of 18 like I sort of had that um you know the the sort of sweet spot where I ran everything super super quick and I just got really really fit from it so I was running quite high mileage I reckon it was probably about 120k a week but it wasn't sort of um as structured in the way that it you know a normal training program would be structured that you would think that you know a female athlete would run sub 75 now but it did work

so what uh what paces were you kind of hitting like you said you kind of went hard like most days

yeah for sure so most days if i was going for a run i'd be running definitely like sub four minute k's you know if i was going to go and do like a 12k run it'd be like 354k type of thing and it would feel like

straight out the door

straight out the door straight out the door and it would be like somewhat hard like i'm not saying that it was i'm not saying it was easy But yeah, that's sort of what I would be doing.

And then, yeah, some really tough hill sessions, like especially in the winter, we'd be running kind of like in the pitch black darkness, like head torches on and we'd do things like 30 minutes continuous and you'd have no idea how long you've been running for.

yeah there's a couple of you know really tough sort of hill locations back at home and you know hill work isn't something that I even do now but I think mentally you know it gets you really really strong especially when you're running in the dark and you've got no idea how long you've got left and things like that and it was the same for being on the track at that time when I would train I would only record my recoveries I wouldn't record the paces of the reps because I was like I don't need to know the pace of the reps I'm just going to run hard which is really interesting because Now, you know, sort of eight years on, of course, I wouldn't do that.

But at the time, it works.

And it was definitely that sort of naivety to, you know, running and kind of like running those longer distances that, yeah, yeah, it's funny.

When did that all change? When did you get more structured for your training? Obviously, it was structured because, like you say, you were still part of a group, you're still part of a team.

But when did you take it upon yourself to have a little bit more structure?

Yeah, for sure.

So then in 2019, I moved to St Mary's University and was coached by one of the uni coaches for a year.

But then COVID hit and uni training was sort of like all over the place.

There was no group anymore because everyone was back at home for COVID.

And then I ran a really quick half marathon.

And then I decided to move coaches after that because I decided that I wanted to run my first marathon.

So I moved coaches and then it was very much a lot more structured.

It was like, no, your easy runs must be this pace.

And the sessions became so hard that, you know, I had to run my easy runs easy because otherwise I definitely wouldn't have been able to do the sessions.